


Shape of You

by AsbestosMouth



Series: Divide [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Cunnilingus, Dancing, Ed Sheeran is to blame dammit all, Ed Sheeran: Kissed by Fire, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, M/M, No actually R'hllor is to blame, Oral Sex, Romantic Fluff, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-11
Updated: 2017-05-11
Packaged: 2018-10-30 16:51:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10880961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AsbestosMouth/pseuds/AsbestosMouth
Summary: Clubs are not the best place to find a lover so the bar is where he goes. Not that Sandor is looking for a girlfriend - he's just out for a drink with his mates - but when this tall and pretty redhead walks into the Flea Bottom pub? He feels as if he knows her, which is bloody weird. Her coming over to talk is even weirder.And then she asks him to dance? Weirdest thing of all, really.Until it's not. Because, seriously? Things are about to get more weird than even those odd dreams Sandor sometimes has. The ones where he's called the Hound and he's some sort of warrior from about a thousand years ago. Yeah. Definitely weirder than that.





	Shape of You

**Author's Note:**

> Ed Sheeran. Sorry. Hey, he's going to be a cameo in Game of Thrones so it does have some sense going on. I want him to be Tormund's tiny ginger bardic daughter even if he is just as pretty as Jon Snow in a far more cuddly and ginger-y sort of way.
> 
> The video for the song can be found [here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGwWNGJdvx8) You don't need to listen to the song, because it'll get in your head and infect your dreams.

* * *

 

 

**_The club isn't the best place to find a lover_ **

**_So the bar is where I go_ **

**_Me and my friends at the table doing shots_ **

**_Drinking fast and then we talk slow_ **

 

Clubs? Shit.

Meat markets for people better looking than him to get off with other people so fucking far out of his league that it’s ridiculous. He’s been once or twice since he hit thirty because he somehow forgot the stinging humiliation and, masochistically, thought he might actually find someone there. Idiot. Sandor Clegane is a decade too old, a lifetime too battered, an eternity too complex to enjoy one night stands and being pawed at by women who see the body and then beer goggle the hells out of his face.

Then, Sandor supposes, his mates are the same. They always have been, seemingly forever. Tormund likes the sort of women who drink real ale and could wrestle him to the ground with their thighs. Women who hike, and have dogs, who can shoot guns and prepare carcasses. Women who are more masculine than Tormund, which, given he’s manly as fuck under his pseudo-hipsterness, is quite an achievement in itself. Beric’s tastes aren’t really covered in polite and normal society settings, so he doesn’t even bother to look. Every so often he ends up shagging Thoros again, because that is what R’hllorists do - they shag each other and set shit on fire; that seems to be the entire point behind their religion apart from the weird reincarnation bollocks they preach - before moving on to someone else even more weird, screwed-up, and usually clad head to toe in black leather.

So, as is their wont, they stick to the local.

As pubs go, it’s alright. It serves local beer and scampi fries, pork scratchings for Tormund, has a decent old-fashioned jukebox with classics rather than some blaring bollocks from boy bands and women who don’t really wear any clothes. The decor might be nicotine stained even ten years after the smoking ban, and the carpet that strange pile that strays between undesirably squelchy and faintly static, and the resident drunk smells distressingly of clove oil and socks, but it’s warm, they rarely end up having trouble, and it’s kind of home. For what is essentially a dive caught between Flea Bottom and the more affluent areas, it’s favoured by a mixture of the more alternative student clientele slumming it from King’s Landing University, and locals like them.

“I tell you,” Tormund says, waving his hands around like a ginger windmill, “she’s Luke’s daughter!”

“Bollocks. She can’t be. If she is, she can’t redeem Kylo. It’s too much like the fucking original trilogy if they start arsing about with that, unless they’re going for the incest shit as well. Would Disney go for the incest shit?”

“Oberyn can’t make it, one of the girls has come down with something and he and Willas are dealing with projectile vomiting.” Beric snaps his phone case shut; as usual, since he’s an ex-squaddie, it takes a hells of a lot more for him to get tipsy than the other two. Sandor and Tormund tell him endlessly it’s because he’s a fat bastard now, and therefore all the booze goes straight to his flab. “I’ve texted Jaime, but he’s not answering.”

Tormund makes a sound like a dying bear. “He’s with Brienne. He’s with my sapphire-eyed warrior woman. Why aren’t I with my sapphire-eyed warrior woman? I should be!”

Sandor stretches out, all six foot six of him, arranging his legs so he doesn’t end up playing accidental footsie with his also enormously tall friends, and knocks back his pint.

It’s quiet because it’s early and a Wednesday. The hardcore alcoholics don’t make an appearance until about nine, and the students should be revising or some shit like that. The cosy darkness, womb-like, snuggles closer. As is usually the case with local pubs like this, the furniture runs towards the dark and sticky, and since it’s an unseasonably chilly mid February, the landlord and his missus keep the open fire going with elbow grease, swearing, and hopeful looks at Beric every so often when it all goes tits up.

It’s quiet to the extent that when the door creaks open and more people slip into an atmosphere fugged with beer fumes and remnants of microwaved pie, the entire place stops to see if the newcomers are friends or strangers. The blast of frigid air wakes the pub from a comfortable slumber, all amber dim and oaken.

Two girls. One, scrawny and dark-haired and wearing denim shorts with striped tights even in this weather, leads the way. She has a pale and set face, slashingly angry eyebrows, massive Dr Marten books, and probably comes up to, at most, Sandor’s nipples. The other?

Fuck.

She’s pretty. Pretty in the way that makes everyone thoughtful. Once she’s shrugged off her scarf, and knitted woolly hat with a pompom, and gloves, and other layers, she’s long-legged and curvy-slender with hair that makes the merry fire in the grate look dull and lifeless, and is rather more traditionally dressed than her punk-goth whatever the fuck she is companion.

They both seem a bit familiar in a sort of muddy, soupy way that Sandor can't quite put his finger on.

Tiny but Angry - there are two people who fit that description in his life, and, thank the Seven Beric didn’t ask the original iteration of that moniker along tonight - goes up on her toes to order some drinks, and promptly, to her annoyance, gets carded.

“I’m fucking twenty, you dipshit! I come here every fucking week!”

“Arya, it’s his job,” Pretty Redhead interjects, flashing apologetic blue eyes - blue, not like Brienne’s sapphire, but brighter, almost a topaz - at the barman tuts all fatherly at them both and gets their drinks.

“I play fucking gigs here. Stranger on a pogo stick, I swear-”

The redheaded girl sighs, sips at her drink, wrinkles her nose. It is possibly the cutest thing he’s ever seen, on anyone, anywhere.

“You’re staring, Sandy.” Beric’s warm wryness interrupts his musing, Sandor coming back to the table mentally. Tormund grins, manic as ever, all wild hair and beard.

“Why don’t you go talk to her, eh?!”

“Piss off, Wildling.”

“She’s very pretty. I think she’d like you.”

“Fuck’s sake, Beric. Not you as well.”

 

* * *

 

“Shut up. You fancy General Hux.”

Beric rolls his eyes theatrically. “I do not fancy General Hux. I like his aesthetic.”

“Of course you like it! It’s all bondage, and leather boots, and marching about looking smart in uniforms. It’s like the army, but sexy. You totally want to bang General Hux.”

“No, Tor. I want to bang Kylo Ren. Though, if offered the choice of Ren and Hux at the same time?” Something flares in the remaining golden brown eye. “Hux is utterly kinky, isn’t he? He wants order from chaos, so ordering Kylo Ren around-”

“Always defaults back to bondage, doesn’t it?” Big hands neatly dismember a pork scratchings packet, laying the plastic flat so all three men can get at the crunchy bits without having to delve in a bag. “Bondage or fire.”

“Nah. Bondage, fire, or reincarfuckingnation.” Sandor nicks a scratching. He only eats them when he’s been drinking, wanting something crispy fat and salty to cut through the yeasty sugary beer on his tongue. He takes his gym membership somewhat seriously until he’s in the pub.

“This is turning into a _Monty Python_ joke. I’m going to get more drinks!” Tormund stumbles off, as cheerfully out of place as ever. While Sandor dresses in nothing but black, and Beric always appears suitably classy-looking if subdued in tone as he hates clashing with his hair and his profession demands such, Tormund favours scarlet checked flannels, and wildly hand-painted Converse. He plaits his hair and beard like a Tolkien Dwarf half the time, and attracts the sort of woman if, he were so inclined, could be his dream manic pixie girl. Not that he wants that, obviously, because delicately pretty and strange about the edges isn’t the capable valkyrie he wants. Which is Brienne. Which is fucking awkward. Because of Jaime.

“We need to get him laid,” Beric sighs. “And get him a job. And a haircut. And possibly some sort of delousing. I wish he’d move back home, even though I’d miss him horribly. He was happier at home.”

“We all need to get fucking laid.”

“Not all of us.” The ginger bastard has the grace to seem slightly abashed with it all.

“Gay bondage shit doesn’t count.” It totally counts. Not that Sandor wants anything to do with gay bondage shit, obviously. He’s not gay, and he’s certainly not into the hardcore insanity that Beric partakes of. Maybe some handcuffs and a blindfold, sure. Tickling. Maybe some wanton nibbling. Certainly no whips, canes, chains, Myrish rope binding, definitely nothing to do with fire and burning, nipple clamps, dildos that could be used as some sort of large bludgeon, suspiciously cock-shaped cages, boot licking, or Ramsay Bolton.

Especially not Ramsay Bolton.

Fucking hells. Beric’s supposed to be the normal one out of them all. Successful entrepreneur and all.

 

* * *

 

**_Come over and start up a conversation with just me_ **

**_And trust me I'll give it a chance now_ **

 

“Excuse me?”

Sandor looks up from being lost in his own thoughts. Tormund and Beric are elsewhere, socialising, but he never ventures out beyond the table edge; they’re the talkers, the charmers, the ones others enjoy being with. He just looms silently, sardonically, makes people into edges and walls with his mere presence. Fuck ‘em.

“Yeah?”

He definitely knows her. It itches like a mosquito bite in the very depths of his brain.

And no. Not topaz. Her eyes are the colour of electricity over midnight skies; utterly striking.

What the fuck she’s doing, beautiful and elegant, hovering about by Sandor Clegane? No clue, really. He grunts, squints up. Somewhere to his left, in an alcove they laughingly refer to, on the pub sign, as a dance floor, lights flicker green and blue and yellow, a kaleidoscope across her face, her hair, the whiteness of her teeth as she smiles just slightly.

“Is anyone sitting with you?”

A flash of flailing arms indicates that Tormund’s trying to dance, and he can see Beric chatting to the nice bloke behind the bar; they both served in the forces, and when his friend reaches a certain blood/alcohol level, he gravitates over, helplessly, towards someone who might understand a little. Sandor tries, but he’s never been a) in the army b) in Qohor c) shot through the skull or d) dead.

“Uh. No?”

She sits, neat and pretty and curiously regal, knees bumping his as she takes Tormund’s chair. For too long he watches her from the side, examining, waiting for something, but the girl merely looks back.

“Uh. Weren’t you with someone?” Shit. She’ll know he’s watched her a bit. Shit. She’ll realise he has the conversational skills of a broken pencil.

“My sister. Her boyfriend and the rest of her band turned up though. They play here, sometimes. Usually when the owner doesn’t want people to come in, I think.” She does that spectacularly adorable nose wrinkle thing again.

“That good, huh?”

“Even better than you’d think. Sorry, I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Sansa. You're Sandor.” It isn’t phrased as a question.

“Right. Sandor. That’s me.”

There has to be a catch, right? Beautiful girls - and yes, not pretty but beautiful, incredibly beautiful, with the most glorious eyes and wonderful hair, and those fucking legs, and the way her t-shirt clings to the smallness of her waist, and her arse an absolute dream in lycra-assisted denim - don’t approach him. They especially don't know his name because it never matters. Sure, they’d think good body. Nice for fucking. Probably a massive cock. Shame about the face. One woman slapped him on the arse once, smirking, told him that as he was a prawn - tasty body, lose the head though - she’d take pity and did he want to go and fuck in the alleyway outside? They see what he sees, every day of his frigging life, from seven years old; scars, and scars, and anger, and more scars. Drinking makes them blur, turns him almost handsome for spans where standards drop and Sandor becomes fair game. The moment the booze stops, and they see his face, then they fuck off in horror.

Of course, with Sansa sat at his right, she doesn’t see the scars.

Shit.

Best put her off now, before he thinks he might have a chance. Stretching, Sandor rolls his shoulders, turns his head and feels the bones in his neck clunk, exposing the hideousness of ruined flesh across his cheek and jaw and just waiting for her excuses.

“Oh-!” Her eyes grow huge as she sees slickness and ruin.

Yeah. Right on cue.

“You’ve not got a drink. Would you like one?” She doesn’t look away. The fuck? But his face? She saw it, she’s still staring. What the actual fucking fuck?

“Uh. I’ll get ‘em.” He stands, turns away. Pauses. Looks back.

Sansa smiles up at him, as lovely as anything he could name.

“What you drinking?”

“Just a Coke, please.”

She’s not drinking. She’s seen the scars. She isn’t getting hammered so she can get a shag with a good body - and Sandor knows that he’s pretty damned alright when it comes to everything below the neck, sure, but psychologically the scars ruin any iota of self-confidence he might grasp at - and she’s not buggering off. Not running away.

He comes back after a few minutes of wrestling through the now throngs before the bar, a bag of crisps in his teeth in case she’s peckish and glasses in his hand and, by the Seven fucking hells, Sansa’s still there.

 

* * *

 

**_Take my hand, stop, put Van the Man on the jukebox_ **

“Do you dance?” she asks suddenly. They’ve been quietly chatting - actually talking, about shit Sandor doesn’t remember but he’s sure he’s smiled more times in the last fifteen minutes than in his entire fucking life, like they’ve got a connexion - and sharing the packet of crisps. She likes salt and vinegar the best, the ones with sea salt and balsamic vinegar, and Sandor accused her slightly of being posh, and Sansa flashed her white teeth and shrugged.

“I’m shit at it.”

“Will you dance with me?” When she stands, he’s faced with her long thighs in snug denim, and the distressed fabric seems to point straight between her legs.

“Seriously. Fucking shit.”

Sansa shakes her head as if she doesn't believe him, holds out her hand and, timid now, Sandor takes it. Under his roughened touch, all scuffed up from mending machinery and holding spanners, she feels like satin and silk; a callous, strange on the topmost pad of her right index finger, caresses where hairy wrist meets solid meaty palm, almost ticklish. The imperfection tugs at his mouth, makes her more human. Beautiful.

“I’d like to dance with you,” Sansa reiterates. For a moment her expression veils itself, protective and opaque in turn, and something deep and heavy drags at his throat when she dips her head, looks at the floor. As if he’ll reject her.

As if someone like Sandor Clegane could ever say no to a girl as beautiful as Sansa?

“Alright then. I’ll break your toes, though. Just warning you.” Getting up, still holding her hand, and her eyes turn navy and then turquoise in the ever flickering dance floor lighting.

“Then you’ll just have to carry me.”

They insinuate themselves into the laughably crowded alcove. Tormund has his tongue down the throat of some gothy-type woman dressed in black; she’s so short that he’s hunched over, and her hands tuck companionably into the back pockets of his skinny jeans. For a moment they break and Sandor sees she’s younger than Sansa, and paler, and vampire-serious with her dark dark lipstick, and Tormund, swaying, seems perfectly happy. She’s unlike his usual fodder, but there’s something unbending and serious about her demeanour.

“It’s quite busy,” Sansa calls up, the music just the right side of too loud. 

“It is for a Wednesday. Half term at uni though?”

She nods.

For a moment they stare at each other, not quite sure how to go about this. Sansa is tall. Tall for a woman, all legs and hips and long but perfectly proportioned torso. Of course compared to Sandor she’s little, but if they press together, her head would rest perfectly in the crook of his neck - her cheek, or her mouth, over where the scars dip beneath the collar of his button down shirt. She said, when they were doing that idle chit-chat getting to know a bit about each other thing they’d been doing, that she likes how he wears the sleeves rolled up to his elbow; something about forearm porn, and strength, and how he could probably swing a sword as tall as her if he wanted. A strange thing to say, but it made sense, sort of. He’d wriggled his fingers to make the grooves in his muscles dance, and a primal expression turned her pretty face into something frighteningly addictive.

“Right-”

The tempo changes. They swing between alternative classics here, with some ‘70s punk, a few cheesy ‘80s dance hits, a smattering of ‘90s rave culture ironically blasted out, then WestPop and the boy bands of the early ‘00s. There’s no DJ, just the knackered looking jukebox that anyone can shove some coppers in. Sometimes Beric takes up residence on a rainy Wednesday afternoon after half-day closing at his shop and feeds the thing, plays David Bowie and Soft Cell, or touches of Glam Rock; he knows all the lyrics. Tormund likes his rock with folk roots because he’s so bloody Wildling. Sandor? Metal all the way to the steel-hard core. The player hasn’t his sort of thing, apart from some of the more commercial Iron Maiden, one Rammstein track, and fuck Metallica, but he can appreciate lyrics and a good pounding drumbeat.

Van Morrison asks if they remember where they went on the day the rains came, and Sansa sways against him. He’s not sure if he’s improved, or just dancing with her makes him better, but Sandor lets the rhythm take him and presses his nose into her copper-rich hair.

 

**_And then we start to dance, and now I'm singing like_ **

 

When the chorus comes, he belts out that Sansa is his blue-eyed girl because really? Brown eyes don’t do it for him any more, or maybe they never have done. One look into those pretty eyes and Sandor flounders and drowns in the endless seas of iris.

“I just knew you would be good,” she says in a sing song that matches the cadence of the music, then they both launch into into the sha-la-las. Sandor never usually sings along, but something about Sansa’s enthusiasm proves infectious, like the Plague.

“Isn’t my sort of thing though.” Two beats, and her hips find his. “Not enough guitar.”

“I think you’d probably like Arya’s band. They’ve got a lot of guitar. They’re very noisy.”

“Maybe I would,” he confirms, then in awe of himself, twirls her.

He's never danced with someone who he innately understands like Sansa. It’s almost like they know how each other moves without having ever met; there’s a bond between them that is inexplicable.

 

**_Girl, you know I want your love_ **

**_Your love was handmade for somebody like me_ **

 

He’s never encountered anyone like Sansa. She seems curious but unbothered about his scars, and Sandor doesn’t know why - it's as if they don't even shock her. Every moment her gaze strays from his own to the side of his face he tenses, waits for the whys and the hows and the will you fuck me and then fuck offs. People tend towards bloody rude when they ask about how he got injured, as if because the ridges and redness of wrecked tissue are on display then they have a right to know what happened. As if seeing something gives them the Gods given right to probe too deeply into something that he never shares, especially with a drunk cunt in a pub in the arse-end of Flea Bottom.

Maybe she’s too damned polite to ask?

She’s all please, and thank you, and carefulness when talking, when listening, and once or twice she pauses, almost schooling her face into an appropriate expression, before tension leaches and she smiles thinly instead. This happens more with strangers, and less with Sandor and the tiny angry sister who stalked over and checked if she was alright, shadowed by a lad Sandor recognises. Gendry, whatever he’s called, fabricates car and bike parts, blacksmiths in his spare time. They’re both in the same industry, albeit opposite sides. Sandor puts things together, takes things apart. Gendry creates the pieces.

Like him, Sandor feels, she’s been hurt because even with Arya Sansa hides something. A something that makes her neat, and careful, and ivory glazed with diamond; layered with a shell that keeps her soft squishy parts safe. He understands that. His own Beric-termed caramel centre is protected with bitterness, enough bristles and sharpness that he makes a hedgehog look smooth and inviting. For all his snarling, and grimacing, and black-tinted cynicism that makes him seem nails hard and twice as dangerous, he understands now that he’s a good man.

His friends are why he knows that, and Sandor loves them for it. Without them? Fuck knows.

Their feet collide in a rare moment of clumsiness, and she laughs, breathlessly, as Sandor catches her about the waist to stop her stumbling.

 

**_Come on now, follow my lead_ **

**_I may be crazy, don't mind me_ **

 

Their eyes meet, and he’s sure he’s fucking blushing like a virgin seeing their first set of tits on the internet.

“Careful, don’t want you hurting yourself,” he rumbles, trying to be cool. “You’re too pretty to get hurt, and it’s a bit fucking mental in here.”

Clubs are bad, but he’d never have thought a dance floor/alcove in a pub could be even more claustrophobic. Everything layers with a faint suggestion of sweat and heat, bodies scented with beer and perfume and natural pheromones crushing closer. In a moment they’re almost parted as some drunken wanker - called Tormund, always bloody Tormund - bellows something incomprehensible, hugs Sandor, then charges off like some sort of enormous demented rhino towards the goth woman with the resting bitch face.

“He’s odd.” Sansa doesn’t seem to be judging as Sandor turns them so his own torso protects her from the worst of the chaos. Underfoot the floor sucks at their shoes, foetid and swampy, the lighting dazzling every ten or so seconds when the yellow beam smacks him right in the retinas.

“We’re all fucking odd. Fucking odd, but we’re good blokes. Decent, all that shit - not like fake knights in supposed shining armour.”

For some reason the words make her smile.

 

**_Say, boy, let's not talk too much_ **

**_Grab on my waist and put that body on me_ **

**_Come on now, follow my lead_ **

**_Come, come on now, follow my lead_ **

 

Sandor stops talking the moment Sansa catches his wrists, long fingers warm, and directs his hands to the narrow curve of her waist. She’s shaped like something illegal, and if she isn’t she should be; like a cello. She’s strings, and hips, and swelling curves, and when she sings her voice dips to an alto on the low notes even if she can ring out the high in a piercingly sweet choir-girl voice. He could almost hear her singing a song to the Mother with such clarity of tone, and it drags like a fish hook at a greenish something he can’t quite remember.  

They fit. They just do. Her softness nestles into the solidity of his torso, his chest, like continents torn apart eons before. Like they've always belonged but never found each other before this.

Where the fuck has Sansa - and he’s not even asked her last name - been his entire life? North, her accent suggests, and probably not born for, what, ten years after him, but she’s there, and the way they move is sin, and want, and no small measure of sheer delight. He’s been ground on, dirty danced with, some woman tried to give him a handjob once, but this swaying, this closeness, is far less filthy and far more tangible than anything he’s ever experienced. They touch, they glance, denim against denim, cotton against cotton, and electricity sparks every nerve in the flesh below. Compared to the vast majority of the others, they’re almost chaste; sex and dancing are the same things, just on differing planes. This is getting to know her, and flirtation - not foreplay and fucking.

Lost in a daze, he realises that he’s almost stopped moving and Sansa is the only thing keeping the rhythm. She raises her eyebrows, and he shakes his head bashfully, before she smiles so bright-wattage that the lighting rig seems dim.

“Thinking. Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she says, and her expression makes him realise that it is. Everything is. Perfectly fucking brilliant, actually. “Just follow my lead.”

 

**_I'm in love with the shape of you_ **

**_We push and pull like a magnet do_ **

**_Although my heart is falling too_ **

**_I'm in love with your body_ **

 

Davos rings the last order bell, and the music fades until all that can be heard is talking, and laughing, and someone  - Tormund - singing his Wildling songs drunkenly in a corner. The gothy woman watches him impassively, arms crossed. She’s wearing velvet, and leather, and could probably break anyone in the pub with a stare. She reminds him of a sullen little bear cub, unamused at the antics of another.

Unwillingly, Sandor peels himself off Sansa. Seriously fucking unwillingly.

Someone kills the dance floor lights, puts on the overheads.

Seven. She’s incredible.

Flush-cheeked and eyes bright, she stands looking up at him. He’s not seen her in less than jeans and a tee shirt, and they aren’t that fitted, but he’s innately intimate with how she’s shaped, how she’s made, how she’s formed. He could sculpt her body from clay and memory; each bump of her ribcage and spine, each smooth parabola of breast and thigh. She’s probably been made in a factory near Winterfell, cast in blood and bone and skin, let loose on an unsuspecting world ill-prepared for the ratio of her waist to her hip. How can perfection exist? How can a fucking god make Sandor look like he does, and then allow Sansa to be so beautiful?

For a moment he almost feels angry at it all, before her long fingers slide into his grip and squeeze, just very gently, can quell any growing rage in his heart.

Fuck. Beautiful and kind. Smart - she’s doing a degree in something. Sandor can’t remember because she’d chosen the moment she told him to rearrange herself with her knee between his which caused his entire mind to short-circuit.

“Want to come home with me?” he asks, the words thick and leaden upon his tongue. “We can talk. No funny business, promise. Unless you-?”

She regards him, and in another lifetime Sansa really could be a queen. Regal, and elegant, and how she moves her body fizzes in his synapses, his cock. He’d die for her, if she were his queen. He’d stand before a army with nothing but a greatsword and he’d let them take him apart if it meant her safety. He can almost see her; in furs of silver and black with a wolf at her heels and the North in her hand.

He can see it so well that it seems more a memory than anything else, which is just fucking ridiculous, but then Sandor’s always had this over-active imagination. Sometimes he casts his friends in roles in this medieval drama he’s got mapped in his head. Sometimes he wishes he had a way with words so he could write it all down, get it from mind to paper.

“I wouldn’t mind a coffee, if you have any? Or tea?”

Shit. He’s asked the most beautiful woman in Westeros back to his. And she wants coffee. Fuck.

 

* * *

 

**_And last night you were in my room_ **

**_And now my bed sheets smell like you_ **

**_Every day discovering something brand new_ **

**_I'm in love with your body_ **

 

Coffee means coffee. Not sex.

Sandor, off his head on the fact that Sansa came home with him, finds he doesn’t give a shit. She’s the first girl that he’s brought back that he hasn’t fucked, and the first he doesn’t want to fuck, or shag, or screw, but wants to have adult and grown-up sex with. Perhaps love making, if things go right in the future. If she wants to see him. If she’d like to go on dates, and then maybe, in years and years, they’ll be married and have children with red hair and grey eyes called Eddard and Alysanne who are far too tall for this world and the next.

Beric texted as they left together, still hand in hand. He’s protective of Sandor, like he is of Tormund and Jaime and Brienne, and even Oberyn to a certain extent. Not Stannis though, because no one can get near enough to the cold bastard to really show him they care. Beric’s the one that had the least fucked-up childhood of them all, and he tries to impart normality onto each and everyone one of his friends; considering that Beric’s fucking weird it doesn’t really work but they all go with it. He asked if everything was okay, and if Sandor needed anything to call him immediately and he’d be around immediately, and to remember to use protection.

“Sugar?”

“One, please.” She drifts about the small living space of his flat, reading book titles, looking at photographs, fingers trailing across soft furnishings. Sansa has a frame in her hand, smiling to herself, as Sandor plonks the mugs on the coffee table.

“Who’re these with you? You look so young.”

Seventeen year old Sandor, his hair long even back then, as scruffy and scarred as always. His arms loop about a handsome and well-dressed muscular redhead and a slightly podgier youth sporting a ginger mohawk, painfully fashionable black-framed glasses, and Wilding tattooes. In front of them due to being shorter - not much in once case and the other by six inches - a ridiculously attractive blond and an equally ridiculously attractive Dornishman, and they both obviously know they are gorgeous, the bastards, smirk at the camera. The last person is rather more rigid and formal in his suit, hair buzzed short to try and disguise premature balding. He’s lurking at their sides rather than being fully involved, though a large freckled hand sits companionably upon his shoulder.

“Beric you probably know from the pub, and Tormund. That’s Jaime, who played on the rugby team with us, and Oberyn who fucked the half of the rugby team that weren’t straight, or at least weren’t straight just for him. Tried to fuck the other half as well.” He taps the glass with a fingernail, tinking lightly over faces. “Stannis Baratheon-”

Sansa’s eyes widen. “The Stannis Baratheon? He looks so different.”

“Yeah. We were all at the same school. Uptight cunt then and still is now. Solid bloke though. He hung around with us because all the outcasts did, and he was a giant nerd. We were all different - me and my face, Tormund being from Beyond the Wall. Beric, everyone liked Beric I suppose, but he’s a loyal bastard and since I was his best friend when we were kids, he stuck with me. Everyone loved Oberyn as well, despite him fucking everything that moves, because he’s just Oberyn. You’d understand if you met him. Jaime was cooler than us, but because we never tried to tongue fuck him because of being the golden boy he liked hanging out. Lannisters. They own half the fucking Westerlands, and he was pretty much the heir back then. He hated every second of being Tywin Lannister’s kid.”

Their shoulders brush and she contemplates the photo.

“It was taken by Brienne, who’s Jaime’s girlfriend, even though then she was a ten year old girl who everyone thought was a fourteen year old boy. We adopted her a bit, because we were sort of mates with her brother, and he went and fucking died, the twat.”

“I almost feel like I know them already with how you talk about them.” She places the photograph back on the mantelpiece with careful hands. “You look happy.”

Most people would make fake-supplicating noises, ask how Galladon passed away, but not Sansa. She absorbs the information and nods faintly, her eyes devastating and gentle.

“Yeah, I was. It was the last photo we had before Beric fucked off to the army and we didn’t see each other really until he got medevaced out of Qohor missing his eye. Death and birth brings people back together, like marriage. Even though we’re still supposedly close with each other, we rarely all meet up. The usual hatch, match, dispatch way of it all. It’s-”

He pauses, watches her, waits for a flicker of boredness, but she doesn’t react like she should, like other people usually do. Usually it’s in the flat, cursory look around, and if he’s lucky they make it to the bedroom before they’re fucking.

“It’s?” she prompts softly, and her thumb brushes against his. “It’s what, Sandor?”

“It’s how it is.” The words he wants to say don’t come. How he misses his friends, and hardly sees some of them. How sometimes he wants to go back to when he was seventeen, and with his group, his Brotherhood as Beric calls them still, getting pissed and watching the sunset, or playing _Goldeneye_ on his trashed console with the cigarette burns melted into the plastic. Tormund smoking weed and giggling, Oberyn and Sandor sharing a bottle of shitty wine. Jaime texting his fucking sister, yes, but grinning and teasing while Stannis destroyed them all with his curious intensity and masterful control of Xenia Onatopp. Sometimes Brienne, who loved her father, but Selwyn never quite got over Galladon’s death, the poor bastard, and Beric mothered the girl endlessly, joined them. No wonder she grew up as blokey as the rest of them.

“You miss them.” Carefully she places the frame down, leans up on her toes, kisses his cheek gently. Right over scars, and stubble that never quite grows to a beard so Sandor keeps the hair mercilessly clippered as neat as it’ll ever be.

“Yeah.” For some bloody reason his voice comes out fractured and gruff, as if his throat refuses to work completely. “Yeah, I do. The Brotherhood together.”

“Maybe I’ll meet them one day?” Stepping back, the space unbearable between them, Sansa retreats to the settee and picks up her coffee. “They must be great people if they’ve got you as a friend. You are a very good man.”

Gods. Everything she says pierces, deep and bloody and arrow-like.

“They’d like you. Beric thinks you’re beautiful.” Gay as he is, Dondarrion’s taste is amazing when it comes to lovely things, and terrible when it comes to men.

“Being beautiful isn’t the most important thing in the world. It can be quite awful, sometimes.” For a moment Sansa’s soft smile drops, her expression changes micro secondly into a melancholia that makes her a haunted nymph in some Burne-Jones painting of love destroyed.

“Ugliness and beauty, two sides of the same fucking coin. Everyone stares, and comments, and the attention’s not appreciated half the time-”

“And most of the time you just want people to go away, leave you alone. Give you space to breathe. I’ve never really been allowed that, in the past. You understand. A lot of people don't care to, but you do.”

He settles next to her, wanting to press close but allowing her a distance if she requires, but Sansa merely toes off her ballet pumps, tucks her feet up, and leans into his torso with a sigh.

“I don’t think you’re ugly. I-I like your scars.” She smiles in a strange sort of way, half-lost and eyes over-bright. “They make you you, and I don’t know why, but that makes me feel safe. Like I’m home, almost.”

 

* * *

 

 

She stays the night.

Nothing happens apart from Sansa borrows an old t-shirt of his, crawls into his unmade king sized bed wearing that and sensible black cotton knickers, half-suffocates him with acres of hair and how he can’t breathe when she snuggles into him. Nothing happens apart from Sandor wondering if it’s ridiculous to fall a bit in love with a girl in less than twenty four hours, but eventually comes to the conclusion that she’s not a girl.

She’s Sansa. It's fucking ridiculous but it's as if he's known her for years with how well they mesh, how they move about each other. How she finished his sentence almost perfectly, albeit with less swearing. How she likes his scars, and isn’t terrified by him. How this is crazy, and if it were someone else Sandor would worry about her being as mad as a bag of frogs, but he gets what Sansa means because, fuck it, he feels it himself.

“Would you like my number,” he asks the next morning, exhausted and bleary-eyed, still damp from a seriously speedy cold shower to stave off his usual morning hard-on. He rubs at his hair idly with the towel, waiting for the rejection because that's the story of his fucking life. He’ll bond with someone, and then have his hopes shattered to masochistic shards of ‘I told you so, dickhead.’

“What is it?” she asks almost gravely, tugging her phone from her snug denim jeans and exposing just a sliver of freckled pale skin where waistband meets stomach. Sandor mutters it, scrubs at his head to hide the redness making his ears burn, misses her awe at the nakedness of his solid chest, how he fills his own black jeans, and the nakedness of  expression as she once again looks toward the scars marring his strong jawed face.

 

* * *

 

**_One week in we let the story begin_ **

**_We're going out on our first date_ **

 

**_< Sansa> hi this is sansa i hope i got ur number ok but if not ill cum 2 the pub and see u again. arya sez davos sez u and ur friends are in weekly so ill see you soon if not rite number. i really enjoyed our nite :)_ **

 

_THIS IS THE RIGHT NUMBER. I’VE NOT WORKED OUT HOW TO TURN CAPS OFF YET. THIS IS A NEW PHONE. FUCKING HELL._

_Looked it up and found out how to do it. Don’t want to yell at you. Fucking rude to be yelling. I had a good night as well. You dance really well_

**_< Sansa> so do u! ur wrong saying u dont lol! ur really rhythmic_ **

_When I stop thinking about it I screw up. You seem to make me less shit in general. At dancing. Not life. You having a good day_

**_< Sansa> not 2 bad. catching up on some work :( my fault for leaving it 2 the last minute lol_ **

_Anything I can help with?_

**_< Sansa> do u know anything about high valyrian???_ **

**_No. But one of Oberyn’s partners does. Want me to ask him something?_ **

**_< Sansa> oooo! could u ask him if he knows anything 2 do with pre-Doom womens poetry plz??? THANK YOU <3_ **

 

It has to be something approaching love. Texting Willas Tyrell is hard enough without getting him to rabbit on at length about his obsession over High Valyrian.

 

_Willas._

**_< w1ll@s> hi S :):):) u ok??? nethin rong? U arnt txtin in CAPS?! Yay! gg u :D:D:D:D_ **

 

Quietly his teeth start to itch. Sansa’s texting is bloody Shakespeare compared to the drivel that comes from Willas’ fingers. For someone approaching genius levels of intellect, he’s fucking awful for picking up on textspeak.

 

_Question. Know anything about female poetry pre-Doom?_

**_< w1ll@s>...why r u askin???_ **

_This is where you’re supposed to fucking wax lyrical. Not be fucking suspicious._

**_< w1ll@s> just i set a essay 4 mi final yr students on that??? and now ur askin an im wondrin why???!!!_ **

_Fuck. You’re her fucking professor. Aren’t you?_

**_< w1ll@s> i dont no wht ur talkin bout want 2 spek 2 oby??? plz dont shout :(:(:(_ **

_...fucking hell you prat. I am not shouting. I’ve turned caps off._

**_< w1ll@s> u cn sond v v scary wen ur txtin sry :(:(:( gon get oby_ **

 

Sandor contemplates throwing his fucking phone at the fucking wall, but instead he takes a breath and dials. The voice on the other end squeaks, for a moment all he can hear is rustling, before a rather less Tyrellian voice tinged with remonstration purrs down the phone at him.

“You have upset my sweet boy, Sandor. Why have you upset my sweet boy?”

“I just wanted to ask a fucking question, and it turns out he teaches this girl-”

“Ah.” Amusement slices through the aura of disapproval in Oberyn’s baritone. “Your pretty red headed girl that Beric told me about most fortuitously? He relayed every detail via text for my pleasure during the evening.”

“Fucking hell-” Bloody Beric!

“And Willas might be her professor?”

“Don’t you fucking dare, you Dornish arse bandit.”

“It gets more and more wonderous by the moment. She is, what? Twenty two? Sandor Clegane, you are a naughty, terrible man for cradle snatching a student? What is her name?”

He growls, which makes Martell laugh even harder. “Fine. Fine. Sansa. And you can’t fucking talk. How much younger than you is Willas?”

“Sansa Stark?”

“...you know her name. Shitting hell.”

“She is most beautiful. I pay attention to beautiful people, Sandor.”

“Fucking touch her and I’ll-”

“So easy to wind up, yes? I will not touch her, lovely man, for she is yours. I would not wish to steal from my friends, would I?” Oberyn pauses, makes a strangely proud sounding noise in his chest. “You made love with her?”

“Fuck off!”

“You did not?”

“No, I bloody well didn’t. We had some coffee and we ended up sharing the fucking bed, but no hanky panky happened, you twattish bellend.”

“You must like her. Hmm. I approve. Willas says she is a very good student, and does not scare him like others do. She brings him wine as a gift, which is most appreciated.”

“Seven, impressive that there is something that doesn’t terrify the shit out of him. He’s afraid of his own f-”

A hum of warning, and Sandor lets his voice trail away. Be a cunt to Oberyn, and that’s fine, but anything against Willas, who is fragile and nervy with his friends and rather more diplomatic and able in public - he wears a mask, like Sandor, like Sansa, like they all fucking do, but his is one made of drugs, therapy, and lots of rampant sex - and the wrath of the Red Viper consumes all.

“Yeah. Right. Thanks.”

“One moment.” A pause, Willas saying something, before Oberyn returns. “He posits something about considering the meter differences between male and female writers, and why that would matter to society at the time? I do not know. He astounds me with his brilliance. Clever boy.”

“Yeah. I’ve no bloody idea either. Give my regards to Ellaria.”

“This pregnancy shall be our deaths. Bed rest. Pah! At least she has us both to tend to her, has my beautiful paramour.”

A few more pleasantries, and Sandor hangs up. Takes a few moments to try and shake off the horror of Oberyn fathering yet another child - isn’t three enough? - or contemplating with mounting discomfort that this one might be Willas’. Wonders how Ellaria doesn’t kill them both with her bare hands, or thighs, knowing the woman. She’s a frightening piece of work, is Ellaria Sand.

 

_He says to look at the meter. Apparently it changes between male and female authors. Fucked if I know._

 

**_< Sansa> OMG. he is a genius! Thank u so much :) how can i thank u?_ **

_Dinner on Saturday might be good._

 

Sandor boggles at his own innate smoothness, something that’s never existed in his entire life ever, before plummeting into yet another pit of probable rejection. Beautiful women don’t date men like him. They don’t go out in public, and dine. They, if they must, keep scarred bastards like him as grubby filthy secrets, to be used as some sort of support system when single, to be tossed aside for the next good looking bloke that sniffs around them.

What the fuck was he just thinking? Now she’s away from him, whatever manly spell he inadvertently put on Sansa has most probably dissolved into the ether.

His mobile vibrates on the coffee table, waltzes to the edge, falls to the floor.

 

**_< Sansa> good with me! what u say 2 yi ti?_ **

_I say fucking yes to Yi Ti. The Amethyst Empress at 7pm?_

**_its a date :) see u then Sandor_ **

 

The fact that she capitalised his name proves oddly, and embarrassingly, wonderful.

The fact that he has a date crumbles about him, finally, at 4am; he’s suddenly woken up with a hideous realisation that he’s never actually been on a fucking date, and has no clue. Shit.

In bleariness he sends a group text to the Brotherhood and gets sworn at in several languages and Stannis, and this hurts like a bitch, says he’s rather disappointed at Sandor’s choice of time to send such a text, and please, can he keep his existential crises to between the hours of 8am-8pm?

The next morning he wakes up, cotton-mouthed after fitful sleep where Gregor sets him on fire again as Sansa watches, but she calls him the Hound and he is her sworn shield whatever the hells that is, to a lengthy email from Stannis, neatly numbered and with appendices, detailing how a gentleman should behave on a first date. Helpful websites are included as part of a bibliography, and the time stamp indicates that not only did Stannis not go back to sleep, but he spent several hours carefully crafting his reply.

He’s a dickhead, and a cold bastard, and sometimes he scares the shit out of even Beric with the intensity of his R’hllor worship, but Stannis Baratheon’s an alright bloke when it comes to it. Useful in a crisis, and the sort of unemotional tosser that it’s good to bounce ideas off; he’s so internal that he makes gastroenterologists seem as if they merely dabble. Beric says he’s seeing someone, but whoever volunteers to go out with a workaholic multi-millionaire with the emotional range of a dried herring has to be some sort of frigging angel.

“Who is it?” he asked boredly, contemplating his pint.

“An angel,” Beric replied, waving over at Davos the bar manager who brought out his last few packets of crisps, for free, because they needed something to munch on.

 

* * *

 

**_You and me are thrifty, so go all you can eat_ **

**_Fill up your bag and I fill up a plate_ **

 

The Azure Empress; the best all you can eat Yi Ti buffet in King’s Landing, and therefore probably the whole of Westeros. It’s owned and run by YiTish natives, welcomed to the loving bosom of another continent due to their amazing cuisine and hard-working industrious nature that puts most of the nation to shame, and the food blows everything else out of the water.

It’s also cheap.

Not that Sandor is cheap, but working as a mechanic isn’t exactly profitable. He and Bronn keep the place going at least, and they’re known for sympathetic restoration work (Sandor) or ripping something apart, shoving in a massively over-tuned engine, and retooling the body work into some hellish hot hatch fucktard demonspawn (Bronn). Obviously his colleague’s work ends up being on the covers of various magazines, usually with the word ‘Lad’ in the title, while Sandor’s appeals to the very precise, very anal types who collect classic cars. Stannis and his ilk, mostly.

Fuck it all. It’s not about cost, it’s about enjoyment. Who doesn’t love stuffing their faces full of crispy nibbles, spiced meats, and rice?

Anyway, Sansa suggested it. She’s a student, so there are probably loans involved even if she is a Stark. They seem the sort of family who want their kids to drag themselves up by the bootstraps and not profit from the Bank of Mum and Dad too much. Maybe a second-hand car here, or a bit of help towards a house there, or paying for a wedding. No mansions, sports cars, designer clothing - none of that Lannister shit that Jaime escaped years ago.

Pushing his wet hair off his face - King’s Landing weather. It’s a cunt - he drips his way into the restaurant. The walls are painted red and bronze, with lots of the usual dragon imagery, the waiters all Yi Tish and welcoming. He mumbles that he’s here to meet someone and they shepherd him towards a small table in an alcove, where the people who’re here on dates tend to be placed, and Sansa sips at a glass of something clear and fizzy before breaking into a smile.

“Shit. I’m late?”

“No, not at all. I was a little early,” she says.

He leans down, kisses her cheek and Sansa lets him. She’s all lemon scented, with a suggestion of cinnamon. He wants to lick her throat and nuzzle into the citrus warmth, but instead Sandor makes himself settle in the chair opposite her.

“I love it here. It’s my favourite place to eat in the whole of King’s Landing. They make the best lemon cakes.”

“Aye?” He’s never one for desserts. Sandor likes savoury, and breads, and things he can tear off bones with fingers and teeth. He’s been accused of carnivorous tendencies, and he’s cool with that; protein’s good for keeping him solid, even if sometimes he neglects the gym. Jaime says he’s a menace to chickens everywhere.

“They put a syrup over the top,” and her eyes shine in the carefully lowered lamp light. “The sugar crusts, and makes the top crunchy, but the inside all soft and sweet and yummy.” She pauses, eyelashes flickering. “Reminds me of someone I know.”

Fuck it. Learning to bake, just to see her reaction to lemon drizzle cake made by his own massive hands, wouldn’t be too shit, would it?

“Hi Sandy, having the usual?” The girl grins at him, winks. She’s all trad in a silk dress with a high collar, and finely made up, with her hair in a series of intricate buns stabbed through with chopsticks. As Yi Tish as Jade is the moment she opens her mouth and speaks with a broad Flea Bottom accent she cheerfully shatters every illusion anyone might have in one fell swoop. She heard Beric calling him Sandy once, and it stuck.

“Sandor,” he grumbles, but the waitress just grins wider.

“A bottle of Tiger beer, yeah? Want another spritzer, Sansa?”

“I’m fine thank you, but I will do when I’ve finished this one, please.”

“You’re cute together,” Jade adds as she comes back with the beer. “I’ve not seen him smile so much ever, and he’s got hot friends who should make him smile. Tell me when Oberyn is single, yeah?”

“He’s more likely to add you to his fucking harem.”

“I’m bad at sharing. Shame. Beric then?” Another dazzling grin and she disappears to bother other paying customers; as always, she knows everyone in the damned room because she’s Jade, and in another life and century she’d be done up in some sort of concubine robes and probably sweet-talking emperors into doing shit for her.

“I do like her,” Sansa says. “Even if she tries to pair everyone off.”

“Yeah, she can’t with us now though, can she?”

Her hand creeps across the tablecloth, shy brushes against his.

“I’d fucking love to see her try with Beric though,” he adds, a deviousness twisting in his head. 

 

* * *

 

**_Fill up your bag and I fill up a plate_ **

**_We talk for hours and hours about the sweet and the sour_ **

**_And how your family is doing okay_ **

 

For a slender girl, Sansa doesn’t half eat. She’s always neat, and ladylike, and carefully finishes what’s on her plate, but she obviously enjoys the cuisine. They go up to the buffet three times - starters, main, lots of puddings for her - and she eats every bite that she chooses.

To be honest it’s impressive, and he likes that she likes good food. Sandor, a big lad even when a kid, eats a lot. Sure, most of the time he puts stuff in the microwave and nukes it, or gets in take aways, and he’s not the best cook of anything that doesn’t need frying, but he’s always loved texture and flavour and complexity on his tongue. He’s the sort that if given a plate of steak and chips wants that bit extra; a seared crust on the meat, and possibly a coating on the fries. Double cook the potato for extra crispiness. Possibly throw in a little bowl of garlic mayonnaise, or a sauce for the steak, or a light suggestion of cayenne. Anything that lifts the meal from a hunk of flesh and a root vegetable on a piece of crockery and into something more rarified and tasty.

And rare. Nothing above medium rare will ever be entertained because there is no room for that sort of barbarity in Sandor’s world.

She cuts into her slab of lemon cake with a fork because she’s classy like that, and Sandor made sure to spoon extra syrup over the sponge as she’d wandered off with fierce excitement in her eyes to get some crepes with ice cream for them both, pops some onto her tongue, and groans.

Fuck.

Women shouldn’t make sounds like that. Not outside the bedroom. They shouldn’t lick their lips with the tip of their tongue, lapping at sugar and lemon.

“Amazing,” she sighs, before cutting another piece and offering it to Sandor.

“I don’t have cooties,” she promises at his expression, mistaking it for something apart from abject desire. He wraps his mouth about the prongs and does as he’s told.

There’s something intimate about them being at this table, on a Saturday night, even if the place heaves with bodies and conversation and Yi Tish covers of popular songs playing out on overhead speakers. They’re close enough that their shins brush with every movement.

“Your sister scared the shit out of anyone with her bad music lately?” He can do small talk. He’s smooth. He read those tips Stannis gave him. “She’s bloody terrifying, the way she looks like she’d stab you as much as fucking look at you.”

“She’s playing tonight.” Sansa finishes her cake, puts her cutlery down correctly on the plate, stares longingly at the remaining puddle of stickiness. “She asked if I was going, but I said I was coming here with you.”

Having Sansa freely admitting to her family that she’s on a date with him confuses Sandor to the point where he doesn’t quite know what to say. Instead he finishes off his bottle of beer with a long swallow, throat working. Hops burst with remainders of lemon on his tongue, a heady combination of the both of them taste like.

When they kiss, possibly, their mouths would be citrus and yeasty against warm flesh.

“Tell me about your family?”

Sansa looks up guiltily from trailing a fingertip through the sticky syrup and, in that moment, Sandor falls in love.

“There’s Robb, he’s the eldest, then me. Arya you’ve met, briefly, then Bran, who is the clever one.” She smiles self-deprecatingly, as if doing High Valyrian as part of her degree is piss easy. “Then Rickon, the baby. He’s the rebellious one.”

“You sound really fond when you say their names.” A spike of jealousy twists deep in his gut, and regret, but Sandor shoves it back with an ease crafted through years of hating his family. The real one he has, the brothers that came from choice and friendship and not blood, are far greater kin to him than any Clegane. Gregor remains a cunt, albeit one locked up for life in Harrenhal. Dad never got over his golden child’s cuntishness and went and died. Mum thankfully passed before the cuntishness burned her son and killed her daughter. Alysanne never had a fucking chance.

“I love my family, though we disagree constantly. My mother says the strength of bond we have means that we might be arguing all the time, but the moment anything happens, we pull together as one.”

“And your Dad’s Ned Stark, yeah?”

Sansa flushes prettily, sucks her sticky finger clean. “He is. He might be the steel baron of Westeros, but he’s just Dad to all of us.”

“Stannis says that he’s the most honourable bloke he’s ever met, apart from Brienne, and she’s a woman.”

“I still can’t believe you’re friends with Stannis Baratheon.”

Shit. Paranoia flares. Stannis might be Stannis, but he’s rich. What if she’s using his contact with Westeros’ Most Eligible Divorcee to get to know the man? What if this is all some fucked up ruse to let Sansa into their little tight-knit group and then she’ll get her claws into Baratheon and break Sandor’s heart and trust in the entire process? He watches her, silently, as she finishes her drink and puts her napkin neatly on the table beside her plate.

“He’s terrifying. I’ve met him a few times, and I respect him, but he’s such a cold fish. His partner is very sweet though.”

“Y’what?” That throws him. Stannis, who hasn’t introduced this angel he’s with to any of them, flaunts them at random Starks who happen to be in the general area? The prickle of irritation flickers from fear of Sansa’s inevitable betrayal - no one so beautiful, after all, etc.etc. - toward bloody Stannis who keeps his actual friends, the people who put up with him, out of the loop and, instead, allows outsiders to meet his partner.

Confusion turns her face soft and lovelier. “It was at an industry dinner. Mum wasn’t very well, so Dad took me as I’m always in King’s Landing and it was last minute. Davos is just so kind-”

“Davos?! From the fucking pub Davos?!”

“You didn’t know? I thought Stannis owned the pub, and that’s why you all drink there!”

“Tyrion Lannister does.” Sandor spools back, before realising what a colossal shower of divots they’ve all been. _Baratheon & Lannister. _ Stannis Baratheon and Tyrion Lannister, two of the brightest and most dangerous legal minds of their generation. Stannis pedantic and dedicated, Tyrion charming and intelligent and also dabbling in a number of clubs and pubs across King’s Landing with his other business partner Varys, and.

Shit. Shitting hells.

“I’m going to fucking murder Stannis,” he finishes, fishing his phone from his pocket with an apology to Sansa and firing off a message to their group chat. All it says is ‘ _YOU’RE FUCKING DAVOS YOU FUCKING FUCKER?!_ ’ before he turns the damned thing off and shoves it in his pocket.

Relief washes over him, a soothing balm of Sansa-scented wonder.

She’s legit. How the hells she is, he doesn’t know, but Sansa Stark isn’t here because she wants to get to his obscenely rich friend. She’s here because, fucking hells, she wants to be.

 

* * *

 

**_Leave and get in a taxi, then kiss in the backseat_ **

**_Tell the driver make the radio play_ **

 

“Sandor?” The chill makes her shiver, and he pulls off his leather jacket, wraps it about Sansa’s slim shoulders. For a moment she looks up at him, inches separating their faces, as if she’s not quite sure why he’s done such a thing - like no one’s bothered stopping this girl being cold before, ever - and then she’s winding her hands into the lining warmed by his furnace-heated body and smiling to herself. Like Beric and Stannis Sandor always runs towards the over-warm.

She suits the jacket, even if Sansa is about seven stone too lean and eight inches too short, and she could wear the bloody thing as a really erotic sort of dress that demonstrates the acres of thigh that Sandor wants clasped around his ears at some point. Shit. If no one’s ever lent her a coat before, imagine what she’d do if he gets to make her come with his tongue?

“Yeah?” She’s ordered an Uber, on a smartphone that has a steel grey and silver case.

“Can I come back to yours, please?” she asks so very politely.

“‘Course you can.” Coffee and talking and getting to know her a bit. It’s all good, isn’t it?

She tucks her arm into his, and they wait quietly at the front of the Azure Empress, not really talking but sneaking glances. Smiling. He’s smiling, and the muscles in the damaged half of his face ache with it all.

“You warming up?”

“Yes, thank you. I like your jacket,” she says, and her hair is fire against his goosebumped bicep, teasing shivers across his flesh. “It smells like you. It’s like being hugged.”

“Fuck. Sansa.” His voice, because it’s a bastard right at this precise moment in time, reflects a curious longing that makes him hoarse, gruff.

She swivels upon the ball of her foot, goes on her toes, kisses his cheek as sweetly as he kissed Sansa’s earlier. Her mouth has a soft yielding quality, a cushiony gentleness as scar meets perfection, and he finds his arms about her waist, fingers splaying across the small of her back.

A honk of a horn and a genially smiling round-faced young man drags Sandor back to the present, where everything isn’t bright blue eyes and copper hair and skin the colour and texture of cream.

“Sam?” she half-laughs, crowding down to the window and not minding how Sandor still has his arm about her. “I didn’t know you drove a cab?”

He’s plump and has the gentle puppyish gaze of a seriously decent person, and he just beams at her with jovial warmth. “Babies are expensive, especially on a medical student grant. Anything to help Gilly get by. Hello, who’s your friend?” This Sam’s brown eyes widen a little as they travel up the height and breadth of Sandor, more in sheer wonder at seeing someone so big rather than terror. He has a lapel badge on his coat proclaiming he’s a brother of the Black, even if he seems far too fucking young and definitely too fat to have served - probably the regiment’s putting him through medical school, as they do for a lot of their recruits, so they’ve got a doctor in a battalion.

“How’s Jon?” Sansa scrambles into the car, which is one of those large saloons that might look smart but due to being a slightly less popular make it depreciates a hell of a lot quicker than a BMW or Audi despite how nice the interior is. Much more affordable, and endlessly reliable.

“He’s well.” The puppyishness becomes adoration. “It’s hard being away from him, but with him being a ranking officer and me being between KLU and Oldtown, we cope.”

“Jon,” Sansa explains, “is my cousin.” She doesn’t go into the relationship between the two men, which sounds like they’re definitely fucking, but that’s what Sansa does. She learns information but doesn’t necessarily spread it about like butter on toast. It gives her a little edge over others, because she understands that sometimes secrets need to be kept.

“Where are you off to?” Sam asks, muting the radio that’s playing some emo alternative music that doesn’t seem his sort of thing.

Sandor gives his address, and meets the man’s chocolate-gentle eyes in the rear view mirror. They’re questioning, and he fixes them with a stare that sends Sam blushing and fumbling at the handbrake.

He doesn’t blame the kid. When faced with a six and a half foot of t-shirt wearing tattooed scarred muscle-toting bastard like him, he’d be wary. Since Sam is a friend, Sandor gets it, he truly does. Beric looks out for him in the same way, even if technically he’s big and ugly enough to take care of himself. Appearances don’t necessarily allow others to see the damage inside, of how broken and battered someone can be; if Sam knew Sandor he’d know Sansa’s got nothing to fear. He might look like some sort of psychopath, but there are others who are prettier and less intimidating who really actually are.

Fingers touch his thigh before Sansa’s palm slides along worn denim from knee to the top of his thigh.

She’s tipsy enough to let her guard drop a little, and comfortable enough with herself and him to touch in public.

“Thank you for tonight,” he mutters, aware of Sam’s ears pricking at his voice.

“It’s been the nicest date I’ve ever been on.”

“Same here.” The only date he’s been on in his entire thirty five years upon Planetos, but Sansa doesn’t need to know that. Not yet. When they’re happily married with a kid on the way they’ll laugh over Sandor’s inexperience, and he’ll say something about waiting for the right person, something faintly cheesy sure but utterly and incomparatively true. No one, before Sansa. No one after Sansa, he hopes. Having tasted this sweet happiness of connecting with another person, even above how bloody gorgeous she is - looks attract, even his it seems, but, in the end of all things, personality and compatibility mean love - he’s loathe to give it all up now.

Her head finds his shoulder in a swathe of chestnut and hints of lemon balm conditioner.

“You’re so nice,” she sighs. “Much nicer than all the other boys I’ve been on dates with.”

“Not a boy.” The tone in his voice makes Sansa smile into his neck, lips negotiating stubble and skin, before she kisses lightly under his earlobe.

Lightning blazes along every vein, every capillary. It burns blood to dragonglass and then his hands are in her hair and they’re kissing like nothing else on Westeros matters apart from tongues, mouths, tactile enjoyment of satin flesh and scar tissue. Sansa whimpers against him, swallowed by his own rumbling moan that vibrates through both their skulls. Fingers dig into the meat of his shoulder, into his thigh, urging him, before she’s got her hand about the nape of his neck. As careful as he is with her, Sansa, quite rightly, understands that he can put up with rather more direct treatment; it’s as if she’s kissed him a thousand times before, perhaps, with how well they meld. A helpless tug, directing him to press her into the cushioned back seat of the Mazda, and he’s got his leg between hers; she’s squeezing with her own, and if they weren’t in a fucking taxi being driven by Sansa’s cousin’s boyfriend or whatever the fuck he is, he’d be doing everything she so obviously wants.

Sansa leads the show. Sandor’s happy to go along for the ride.

“Sam?” he mutters as they have to surface for air. Almost beneath him Sansa smiles, all red-mouthed and glistening blissed-out eyes. She looks like she’s already been fucked, and fucked well, and fuck. Fuck.

“Yes?” The young man is pinker in the cheeks than anyone he’s ever seen, avoiding Sandor’s gaze in the rear view mirror.

“Put the radio on.”

It’s an order. Not a request. Poor bastard doesn’t need to hear his boyfriend’s cousin being kissed to the Seven and back.

 

* * *

 

**_Every day discovering something brand new_ **

**_I'm in love with your body_ **

 

Splayed out on the dark red sheets like some Wildling lass from legend, she is perfection in every line, every curve. He’s never seen anyone like Sansa Stark. Not outside of dreams. No one can ever be like her. Other women are merely beautiful, and while she undoubtedly is, there’s more to her than her looks. Fuck her past boyfriends for treating her like some trophy and then getting pissed off at her when they found out she’s far more than something pretty to show off to the world. Harry merely fucked other women. Joffrey beat the shit out of her. She’s not said that, but he knows somehow and Sandor, too far gone, doesn’t question his knowledge.

It’s all at her pace. All of it. Every time he touches her Sandor checks to see if she’s alright. Sometimes she’ll tense at the brush of fingers at certain points of her body, and he’ll stop the moment her muscles flicker and wait for her to consider.

She likes gentle pressure and rough fingertips, the juxtaposition of care and masculinity. She likes how large his hands are, hands that could hurt her, how he uses them to soothe every quiver until she’s a liquid thing under his ministration. Sandor knows this because Sansa tells him, her forearm across her eyes, in between biting lightly lightly at her other wrist and moaning his name out with the intensity of a woman who has never, in her fucking life, been made to come by someone else.

She calls him ser, and he growls against her hip that he is no fucking ser; her hand tightens convulsively in his.

All about her, because it’s right to do that. Sandor has climaxed a literal fuckload in his life, and he wants Sansa to feel that sweetness properly and fully, for the first time, with his tongue tasting her, his lips and stubble coaxing her pleasure. As they tip-toe gently through this initial bout of cunnilingus she grows bolder as his fingers breach her, and she winds her hands into his hair as she attempts, desperate and gasping, not to grind up into his face. Not that Sandor’d care because he wants her to understand her power and not fear her sexuality. She makes the sort of noises that have him hard and needy himself, but he holds back because, damn it all, Sansa should know that sex with someone who cares about her - and Sandor does, he’s in love with everything about her, absolutely everything, body and mind and soul, always has been - can be incredible.

Not that Sandor knows. He’s never experienced it himself. He understands the concept, sure. He’s fucked enough and wanked enough in his time to enjoy orgasm, but has sometimes obsessively wondered what making love to someone he truly wants, and respects, and loves, might be like. Not that he expected to ever get such an opportunity; he never thought that someone like Sansa Stark could actually willingly like him for himself rather than just his body.

But then, according to the fragments he’s pieced together from somewhere, he can’t recall where from - if he gets his hands on those two cunts she dated before him, he’ll mash their handsome faces into a fucking pulp - Sansa never realised that someone might also like her for herself. Which is shit. Absolute shit. Her body is one part of the multi-faceted jewel that is Sansa. An incredible, wonderful, perfect body, bearing tiny marks he wants to know about, and a rather more angry scar at her ribs, beneath her left breast. How she dips and curves against the hunk of meat that makes up his own body. An incredible mind, sharp and clever and bright with promise. Those tiny ideals she still clings to, so wistful, about knights in shining armour who ride white steeds and carry the favours of their lady loves to battle.

She’s romantic, in a way Sandor once was. Before Gregor. Before his face. In Sansa he sees what could have been for himself if life hadn’t repeatedly kicked him in the bollocks, and Sandor wants to both protect and educate. Romance is fine, as long as heads aren’t left in starry skies, or lost in dreams of something that might never happen. Her innocence still lurks, a shy creature, shot at and stabbed at by fucking Joffrey shitting Lannister and that fucking Hardyng and, ever worse, that cunt Baelish.

“You’ve ended up with a bastard with a motorbike and a leather jacket rather than a knight with a charming smile and a nice horse,” he pointed out to her, on their date, and Sansa merely smiled in that secretive way of hers that sends Sandor’s heart clenching treacherously in his chest.

“A good man is better than a knight who has no idea about chivalry,” she’d replied, her fingers laced in his. “Someone once told me a knight is just a man with a sword, after all. Anyone can have a sword, but not anyone can be a decent person.”

It sounds like something Sandor would say himself, again with less cursing, and it makes him grin.

They’ve known each other, what? A bit over a week? A full almost fortnight of texting, and a couple of phone calls that lasted well over an hour, and just. Fuck. Can you feel like you’ve known someone over lifetimes? Can it almost be like you’ve met them over and over and you’ve always danced the same dance, and fought the same fights? Sometimes Sandor wonders if they’ve always been together, and they just never knew? He told Beric that, jokingly, when they met for the usual Wednesday night drink during the week and a half between first finding Sansa and going on their date. Dondarrion’s golden-fire eyes widened, just a tad.

“Listen to your dreams,” his friend replied in a strangely careful tone. “Write them down, if you need to. If you need to talk to me, Sandy, you know where I am.”

The fire bastards believe in reincarnation, but Sandor is sure reincarnation doesn’t believe in him. Sometimes, though. Sometimes. Occasionally, when he sleeps, he sees Beric in red-stained leather and wearing an eyepatch, commanding a Brotherhood that is not of their own making but the men love him as much as his current friends do. He sees Stannis crowned in iron and as lean-faced and obsessive a man as ever, shadowed by Davos from the pub, a man torn between duty and what he truly desires. Jaime with his right hand gone at the wrist and a prosthetic glistening gold as he runs a knife across the throat of his bitch sister. Brienne and himself fighting to the death as he feels the blood pour from wounds that wake him; he feels them as sharp then as when they were scored into his flesh. His leg aches for days afterwards. Oberyn dead by the hand of Gregor - that one hurts the most, that one makes him text the man to see if he’s alright because, fuck. Fuck Gregor.

A tall slender woman with auburn hair swept into some simple style he immediately understands as Northern, a circlet upon her pale brow. At her breast is embroidered a wolf, and she wears a cloak of yellow and black. In all she surveys she is queen; regal she is, and elegant, and the ring upon her wedding finger is a simple band of dragonglass.

“The King told father to give me a dog when he had my direwolf slain,” she said, and her vowels reflect an age before the language shift. “Father died. I chose my own dog, my own loyal Hound. My lord husband. My Sandor.”

That hits him viscerally, hunger and lust wrapped in love. He buries his face between her thighs and devours her and Sansa squirms, breathless, singing her climax like a bird.

 

* * *

 

“Sandor?"

He twists slightly, his head pillowed against Sansa’s belly, as she combs her fingers through his tangled mess of hair. “Yeah?”

“I was wearing your cloak,” she says, thick throated and whisper soft. “I always had your cloak, from when-”

Fuck.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His blood beats a tattoo in his wrists, his temple. Tall, graceful, in yellow and black, and crowned with a simple diadem like her dead brother once was. He’s never been one to believe in anything apart from the spectacularly mundane. Fuck gods apart from the Stranger. Fuck religion. Fuck magicks and mysticism. Nothing outside of normal life exists, and Sandor believes that, has to believe that, because if gods exist, and if Beric is right, and his fucked up fire religion is truth, then what he sees in his head are memories, not dreams, and.

He makes a tiny noise in his throat, a cross between a tearing sharpened laugh that grates tissue and a howl.

“Please don’t tell me it was just me. You-” She fractures and scores him open. In a moment she’s changing, emotion draining from her as a mask slips easily across her lovely face; Sansa turns from flesh and blood into a painting by one of those medievalists, all perfect hair and serenity hiding her truth. Like some dead fucking bint in a boat, or Ophelia, and he shoves his body up the mattress towards her and touches her cheek.

“I’m sorry. I was mistaken. I just sometimes have silly little thoughts-”

No. No, not stupid, not at all. He can’t cope with Sansa retreating away and it being his fault, pushing her away, his lies driving her to how she was in King’s Landing, before she returned North. He’s the Hound, he never lied to her. Their entire lives were built on his being the one bastard who loves her enough to never sweeten reality, or manipulate her into being a pawn, and he just loved her because she was Sansa Stark, who is the only good thing in a life marred with death and slaughter and pain.

Sandor doesn’t know what the Seven happens as two worlds whirl in his post-orgasmic mind. All at once he is in a fortress with silver and black pennants streaming, and a messy bed with a woman who he loves, and he’s so broken at the intensity of everything that he can’t pretend. He just can’t. He’s too torn open and charged, knackered and in thrall, to tell Sansa she’s wrong once more.

“No. Shit. Sorry.” Sandor fists the pillow behind her head as his resolve breaks and his entire body sags. “Your Hound. Your dog,” he babbles, and he’s shaking and his nose aches as he tries not to be a twat and sob all over her. “Fuck. You had a fucking crown, Sansa. You were a Queen, and what the hells is a sworn shield anyway? I don’t know what the fucking Seven hells is happening!”

“I don’t know. I knew you. That’s all I know. When I saw you, I knew you from somewhere, and the moment our eyes met I knew you’d keep me safe. I knew you would. I just knew. I don’t even know why, or how, but your scars are like his, the one I’ve dreamed about since I was eleven, how he was so kind when they were so awful to me, and he saved me. He saved me. You saved me.”

She’s crying now. Not ladylike tears that slip delicately over pale cheeks but honking gasping  wails that wrack her body until Sandor pulls her tight against his own torso because that’s all he can do, and Sansa disintegrates. There’s snot involved. He doesn’t give a flying shit because he’s as screwed up about whatever the fuck this is as she is, because if she sees it too? If they’re both seeing something when they’re connected?

The obviousness cracks him across the cheek, a slap of reality in a moment that is anything but.

Beric fucking knows. Course he does. He said as much when they met for a swift pint on that Wednesday, bastard R’hllorist fuckweasel that he is. He probably knows them all, now and then, and has died a thousand times and still remembers. He’s not sure whether to punch the twat in his overly impressive nose or just go and demand to know what the hells is going on. Is this some devious cosmic plan? And if this is real - it’s not, but he’s wavering on that because Sansa saw it too - how did it end? How the fuck did they end? History might say, but when history becomes more mythology than actual reality, like the First Men, or the Children of the fucking Forest, how can it be trusted? Is Sansa just a footnote in an ancient text somewhere? Is he a name cast to death and nothingness, like the vast majority of everything? Are they, as always, pawns to greater powers like Dragons, and Winter, and the gods?

“It’ll be alright, little bird,” he says, and he doesn’t know why the phrase spills from his mouth; it feels right on his tongue though, and it soothes Sansa to sniffles.

“It’ll all be alright.”

 

* * *

 

“Beric.” His voice fractures, crevasse deep.

“I got you a drink.” Dondarrion wears perturbed like he wears his suits; really annoyingly well.

They’re not in the pub for once, because it’s either too early or too late depending on how you look at it, and Sandor, having not slept because of the whirling thoughts in his head driving him half-mad, picked the phone up at 5am and rang the one person in this mess that might be able to give some sort of answer. Whether it’s sane or not, he just needs something to try and make sense of this all. Sense of this duality, he supposes, where sometimes he’s just Sandor and then he’ll slip sideways, seamlessly, and he’s a steel-clad bastard called the Hound who loved a woman who was a Queen. Since he and Sansa made love, and yes. Not fucked. He never fucked her, not now, not then, not ever. Since then, not even twelve hours previously, he can’t hold onto himself. Sandor Clegane, mechanic, slips through his desperate hands and instead he clasps at Sandor Clegane, warrior.

Just past 7am and the place has been open perhaps five minutes. A sleepy barista, ugly-attractive and obviously hung over potters about turning on random machinery and poking coffee. Beric greets this Theon with a careful politeness, though the young man stares almost through him, grunts sourly, brings over a long latte and an something bitter, black, and resembling tar.

“Ramsay’s ex,” Beric explains, stirring three sugars into his already caramel-swimming drink. “I’m the enemy, apparently.”

“Are you going to tell me that they were fucking whenever what the bloody hells is happening in my head was happening?” he asks because it’s as good an opening as any. Still his vocal remains rough and harsh; Beric looks up. He doesn’t seem surprised, whatsoever.

“I thought this might happen when I saw you and Sansa together. And it is not as simple as who shags who, Sandor. Nothing’s ever simple, especially sex.”

“We’re in bed and then we’re seeing both some bullshit about her being a sodding Queen and me being her husband. What the fuck is going on?” His fingers curl into a fist, the ghost of maille and leather across his knuckles as the urge to punch Beric in the face grows to crescendo, before it melts once more; that ebb and flow of anger and fear - the Hound feared, he knows that, and his scars were fucking appalling compared to Sandor’s cosmetically tidied ones - that he can’t shake off. It mantles about his shoulders, great furs in Winter.

“Sandy-”

“Don’t you dare Sandy me.”

“Fine then, Clegane.” Beric wraps a hand about the glass that his ridiculous coffee warms. Gives him a considering look as if wondering how much to divulge. Nods and presses the launch button. “Past lives. They exist. You were and are Sandor Clegane, second son of Lord Clegane, never knighted but you wed the Queen in the North, Sansa Stark. She bore your pups. You lived through Winter. Many of us didn’t. Some of us were already dead. Some of us refused to stay dead,” and he smiles almost nostalgically, tinged with a sharp resignation. “We’re all here, once more. We’re all singing the same old tune, dancing the same old dances. Loving the same old people. Apart from myself, of course, but I seem somewhat outside of things because, Sandor,” and Beric leans in, as equal to the knight he once was, and always will be, “I remember everything. Every single part of what we lived through, and how painful it can be to die. I’ve only passed away once in this existence, and seven in the run up to the Battle for the Dawn. I remember everything and am trying my damndest to stop us making the same  mistakes as we did last time. Think of me as some sort of Watcher, perhaps, trying to keep the people that I love safe.”

Sandor ignores that last part. He doesn’t need Beric softening him with declarations of friendship and regard. The ginger bastard has a way with words, always has. Always did.

“Prove it then.” Proof. Always proof, always something to snag onto, to peel apart and understand. He liked science at school, and maths, because they made sense. Rules and reasons, and logics, even if it makes him sound more like Stannis than he’d like. Logic states that a man cannot live more than once, and even though he is living the evidence in these fucked-up little flashback moments where is he all at once a murderer and the husband of a Queen, and a mechanic who lives in Flea Bottom, and altogether utterly Sandor, he still needs it laid before him. He needs to a tangibility to grasp so he’s not half-convinced that he’s running stark raving mad.

Or that they’re all playing a fucking twisted joke on him. Obviously.

“Is this going to be like when I tried to prove the existence of R’hllor?” Another of those frustratingly zen smiles.

“Fucking hells, Beric! I’m going crazy because of these fucking images, and you-”

Beric’s hand, perfectly steady and kind and that slightest bit too warm as ever, cups his cheek for a moment and silences him. Few are allowed near the scars, or want to be, but they’ve always been mates. Were they back then? Did they hate each other? Fuck it all. _It doesn’t exist,_ he snarls at himself, but if that’s the truth then why did he and Sansa share what they did? How could that happen if there wasn’t something else involved, something greater and terrifying and wonderful beyond anything Sandor has ever experienced.

“Sansa has a scar.” He touches his torso, across where his ribs are padded in softness.

He’s seen that scar. He rested his cheek against it and dreamed of a queen in yellow and black calling him her dog.

“Just here. You told me while we travelled North with our Brothers that it was because of Joffrey having her beaten before the Iron Throne. All those fine lords and ladies watched while the Kingsguard did it - your Kingsguard though you never took part in her torment - and you told the incestouous child king enough. You wrapped Lady Stark in your white cloak. You took her to her rooms and bade the woman who was Tyrion Lannister’s whore to bathe her wounds. She’ll likely still have that scar. Like I have the scars of my deaths and you have the one Gregor gave you. It’s strange, really, how that works, isn’t it? Your face, and my eye. Jaime’s not lost his hand yet though, so there is hope, but I’m just waiting for the day he does. Oh, Brienne’s scars, but Galladon was only five when he died last time, and sixteen when he died this, and at least someone hasn’t tried to eat her face. It will happen though. It always happens, in whatever way. Some different, and some not. Sometimes I’m not even sure what’s happening.”

For some reason he glances at the sleepy barista, fiddling at his mobile phone. He’s missing a finger on his left hand.

“I don’t think that was Ramsay. He’s never said.”

“...the fuck?”

“Therapy really does wonders. ” Cryptic cunt, but he shudders at the allusion. As much of a colossal sadist that Bolton is now, what the hells was he like before drug therapy and psychiatry? Like Gregor? Worse than?

His world explodes, just a little more, and Sandor, being Sandor, kicks back harder.

“I still don’t believe you,” Sandor lies again, sick at the thought of Ramsay Bolton, Jaime’s hand, and Oberyn dying because of Gregor. The nausea rises, hideous and wrong and choking, and he gulps at his coffee to try and swallow back what threatens.

“Sandor.” Beric leans in, his warm expression earnest, intense. “This is no curse, but a second chance from R’hllor. We can learn from our past, can’t we? I understand that it is important to grasp life with both hands because I might die at any second and, trust me, that’s seriously unpleasant. You will understand, too, why we have such an honour. One day.”

“Gregor killed Oberyn.”

Another of those priest-like nods of his, all calm understanding. “In this existence Gregor has been arrested, tried, and sentenced to life without parole. In our past he was a weapon, as much as you or I, but one wielded by a hand far more dangerous than either of us who let him do whatever he wanted without restraint. In both he burned your face. As I said, times change and we learn, Sandor. As much as some matters are the same, others are different.”

Beric smiles once more, and it strikes Sandor that he looks tired. Tired, and older than his thirty five years, and his eyes seem ageless. If he’d not met the bloke when they were seven years old, thrust together in that Stormlands boarding school that created their little brotherhood, he’d be perfectly willing at this point in time to accept that Beric Dondarrion never died and just got rebooted every so often in the same battered body like someone repurposing a knackered computer.

“How the fuck do you even cope? Knowing everything?”

“I am at peace with the past. It was a long time ago, after all, and we are all different now. Like what we are now as opposed to when we were kids at school, I suppose.”

Silence envelopes them as they drink their coffees, both lost in thought. The most important question hangs between them, shroud-clothed and elephantine. Sandor wordlessly downs his drink, places the mug back on the table, fixes Beric with a stare that feels both haggard and thin, and asks it.

“Who else knows?”

Beric examines his neatly manicured fingernails. “You. Thoros, obviously. Stannis, to a certain extent, though he prefers not to dwell on what he did and blocks as much as he can. Those who worship R’hllor and know of His power.”

“Why me, then?” Fuck R’hllor.

“Because, Sandor, you might not believe in the Lord of Light, but He definitely seems to believe in you. I’ve always seen that in you. And, well. You and Sansa are both kissed by fire, obviously, and Gods do love their cosmic jokes so I’m told. Perhaps the, uh, coming together of you both-?”

“I’m not gin-” He gets it, stares at Beric with a lack of amusement that makes the other grin broadly. “Fuck off, Beric. Especially with the sex jokes.”

“Sex drives worlds, mate, but love drives universes. A quick shag didn’t set you both seeing, but love? Love is something that can’t be explained, even by us Red Priests. Especially love like yours and Sansa’s. I envied you, Sandor. I never loved like you, I never had the opportunity, and Thoros always prefers a god rather than a man. So many of us didn’t. Your love shaped centuries. Your love changed Westeros. Your love endured across time and space, you lucky bastard, and you’re sitting here talking to me when you’ve got the Queen in the North, the most beautiful woman of her generation, waiting for you? Bugger off, Sandy, and seize your lives with both of your hands.”

 

* * *

 

**_Every day discovering something brand new_ **

**_I'm in love with the shape of you_ **

“Sansa?”

“In the bedroom.”

Sandor shrugs off his leather jacket and shirt, throws them carelessly over the arm of the settee, and pads into their room. Where once it screamed bachelor pad, a;; hard lines and monochrome, now little trinkets of femininity appear next to manly bits and pieces; a hairbrush and a few sparkly slides. A bottle of lemony-sweet perfume nudging a rarely worn cologne that he got for his birthday a few years before. Slippers. He’s never owned a pair of slippers in his entire lives. There’s actual fruit in a bowl in the living room.

Fruit. Fucking bananas and all that shit. It even gets eaten or, if not, made into cake.

“Got you a present,” he rumbles, fighting back the heat rising in his face and cock as Sansa gives a tiny murmur of excitement and reveals that she’s in nothing but one of his band t-shirts - Rammstein today - and black knickers that hug low on hips and thigh.

“Thank you, Sandor.” Rearing up in a river of red hair and soft over washed cotton she kisses his nose, lips, nuzzles the hairy centre of his chest, before settling back like a child about to have the best birthday gift ever. None of her previous boyfriends got her anything nice and for her own sake. Joffrey dressed her in beautiful clothes and jewels as a power trip. Harry almost gave her an STD because he’s a man whore. Having met the present iterations of both men it took Sandor a great deal of willpower not to beat the living daylights out of them while yelling something about this being for the Queen in the North and her loyal sworn shield.

He’s not met Baelish, and prays he never does, because he’d be in Harrenhal with Gregor.

He hands her bag, all tissue-paper stuffed and ribbony like she likes, and Sansa carefully undoes the myriad bows. She even takes the paper out carefully, smoothing and folding, and that thin blade of love he carries like a weapon turns on its owner and stabs him in the heart once more. Loving Sansa is wonderfully painful, half the time, and he’d never change a single bloody thing. Apart from her snoring, though. Fuck the snoring.

Bound in faded brown morocco leather and embossed with worn gilt lettering, the book might seem unimpressive. However, when Sansa reads the title her eyes widen and then glow wetly, and she buries her face into his belly with the tiniest of whimpers.

“Thank you,” she breathes. “Thank you. Thank you, Sandor.”

“S’alright, little bird.”

Getting the tome from Myr of all places had been a ballache. Sandor mentioned Sansa’s love of the old tales of the North to Tyrion, who put a word out to his megalomaniacal antiques dealing friend in Essos who ‘sourced’ - fucking found, dammit, sourced is what you do to meat albeit with different spelling - this very book from Meereen of all places. It cost more than Sandor expected, but Varys is a fucking consummate salesman and possesses the same silver tongue as Lannister Minor, so he’d just said yes. Send it. I’ll PayPal. Whatever.

She opens a page, runs a careful fingertip along the beautifully printed vellum. It’s old. Ancient, perhaps. Post printing press certainly, but not so far along that mass production had become an art form, and studded with hand-coloured woodcut plates that show a tall red-haired queen clad in black and gold, a scarred man dressed in armour at her side.

 _Yr Cwen And Hir Honde Kniht_.

The earliest existent tale of Sansa Stark and Sandor Clegane, heavily romanticised as was the fashion, written in the middle form of the common tongue. The punctuation reflects the change of language from medieval to modern, but the text itself is as beautifully impenetrable to Sandor - it’s Sansa who can translate, or, when really flummoxed, Willas Tyrell nervously helps out - who has no clue what half of it says. She’s writing it down, bit by bit, cross referencing books, and scraps of text, anything she can get her hands on. She keeps meaning to ask Tormund if he knows any Wildling tales of the Queen in the North, but catching him a) sober and b) away from his microbrewery kit proves bloody impossible these days.

“It’s beautiful. I can’t believe that you found this,” she breathes.

“Just thought you’d like it.” Her praise makes him curiously bashful even now, still unused to someone being so expressive.

Sansa shifts, all legs and bright lovely eyes and curves that dominate half his waking mind, wraps herself about him, encourages him down onto they bed and they stay there, breathing together, as the shadows of evening slowly creep into the depths of their bedchamber. Just being with her, touching and not even talking, feeling her warmth through clothing, relaxes into him. Just that. It encapsulates why they are meant to be, why they were, why they are. Darkness eventually falls and still they lie together; Sansa’s head pillowed on his bare chest, fingers splayed across his abdomen.

He loves her. Everything is just that simple during these moments of peace where they are themselves. Sometimes they share the daydreams. Inconsequential little snippets of a life half-remembered that feels as if they are watching a film on a two-person cinema screen. Neither he or Sansa have such vivid thoughts when they’re apart, as if them touching powers the connexion. If she sees the more violent and painful side of her past life when she’s alone Sansa does not say, and Sandor prefers not to mention the nature of himself. The bitter sourness of that warrior is all at once alien and utterly him, and it terrifies the shit out of him that, for the grace of whatever god - probably R’hllor - goes he.

With Sansa in his arms he dreams of hope and spring, not winter and death.

Here, with her, as then with her, centuries ago, the night holds no terrors

Even if, sometimes, the will of R’hllor does.

 

 

* * *

 


End file.
